September 24 spam update: seeing traffic drops across multiple sites, what's your recovery approach?

The September 2026 spam update started rolling out on Sept 24, and I'm seeing a lot of volatility across the sites I'm monitoring. Several have dropped noticeably since around that date, and it looks like a mix of sitewide and page-level losses.

nadimmahmud007 said:

The September 2026 spam update started rolling out on Sept 24, and I'm seeing a lot of volatility across the sites I'm monitoring. Several have dropped noticeably since around that date, and it looks like a mix of sitewide and page-level losses.

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however i would keep my hands off the panic button for the time being. first, check the ranking loss with respect to their former positions, backlinks, content quality nd search intent. if the same kind of pages are losing their ranks on different websites, then it is a strongger signal.

I’d first compare the pages that dropped against the ones that held up. Check if the losses are mostly thin pages, pages with weak internal links or pages that rely heavily on similar content. I wouldnt start changing everything at once. Fix the obvious weak pages first, then give it some time and watch GSC before making bigger changes.